Risks of using URLs directly

This builds a direct dependency between your website and this StaticMap script, which is currently hosted as a experimental thing on the development server. Clearly this can have periods of unavailability, or may be switched off at any time (which would mean no image appearing on your site). Like any service on OpenStreetMap servers, it comes with no guarantees of service continuity.

The StaticMap script may not scale well to many websites using it in this way. So far there aren't really any websites doing this. You'll need to discuss usage particularly if you are running a high traffic website. Normally for more service stability / scaleability we would look to host this on a different server, and/or behind a squid proxy (as with MapOf)